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Contributors
Doug Gamble- Contributor
Doug
Gamble is a former writer for President Ronald Reagan and
resides
in Carmel. [go to Gamble index]
 Michael
Moore's Skunkworks
Filmmaker turns out intellectually dishonest work on screen and off
[Doug
Gamble] 5/13/04
You have to give filmmaker Michael Moore credit. He has brought
fame and fortune upon himself by carving out a role as the
skunk at the American garden party.
Ranking alongside
movie director Oliver Stone as one of the more despicable conspiracy
theorists and America-haters this
country has produced, Moore has been making a stink over Disney's
refusal to allow its Miramax subsidiary to distribute his latest
documentary, Fahrenheit 911. But like much of the
content of Moore's films, the controversy is phony.
Screaming about censorship and a violation of free speech rights,
Moore accused Disney of trying to torpedo the U.S. release of
his movie shortly before its debut at the upcoming Cannes Film
Festival. But he later admitted, in a rare display of candor,
that he knew a year ago that Disney was not going to distribute
it.
This directly
contradicted a letter Moore sent to his supporters saying he
found out only
on Monday of last week that Disney had
thrown cold water on the movie. The filmmaker is now saying that
Fahrenheit 911 will be in theaters in July, and Miramax says
there was never a deal to distribute it, only finance it.
The publicity
stunt worked in generating the kind of controversy that results
in
a lot of green at the box office. After Moore
accepted an Oscar for his movie, Bowling for Columbine at
last year's Academy Awards with a speech that essentially accused
President Bush of being a liar, there was a 110 percent increase
in ticket sales for the film. Costing $4 million to make, it
ended up earning more than $21 million in the U.S. alone.
While Moore knew all along that another distributor would bring
his latest work to the screen, his big con even roped in the
Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Both papers jumped
to his defense with editorials blasting Disney for censorship
and for depriving Moore of the right to express himself.
Disney's refusal to associate itself with Moore's poison is
understandable. The film reportedly suggests that Bush welcomed
the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as a way
of consolidating power. It also portrays a supposed illicit relationship
between the Bush and bin Laden families and between the Bushes
and the Saudi royal family.
What corporation in its right mind would want to find itself
at the center of a raging political controversy during a presidential
election year?
Moore is obviously
hoping Fahrenheit 911, the latest
cheap shot in a continuing crusade against Bush, will influence
the outcome of November's presidential election.
If Moore
is a master of hype he has also displayed a Goebbels-like ability
to shape
his documentaries into propaganda pieces that
reinforce his point of view by distorting the truth. In both
his first film, Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine, he used clever editing tricks, out-of-context
dialogue and misleading juxtapositions to inflame passions and
skewer conservatives.
None of this
is surprising considering Moore is one of America's most extreme,
not to
mention obnoxious, leftists. A former editor
of the socialist magazine Mother Jones, he once drove
through southern states with a tractor-trailer painted as the
communist flag of the former Soviet Union to gauge reaction.
And he was arrested while shooting a video for actions that resulted
in the shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange.
One of the ironies,
if not hypocrisies, of Moore's career is that bashing wealthy
corporate "fat cats" has made
him a wealthy man. It makes one wonder why he doesn't put his
money where his foul mouth is and finance his own movies. Apparently
he doesn't have the same courage of his convictions that Mel
Gibson has.CRO
Copyright
2004 Doug Gamble
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